Silverlight 4 also hits public beta

Just four months after Microsoft launched Silverlight 3 in July, the software company released Silverlight 4 to public beta on Wednesday.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s equivalent of Adobe Flash, which essentially is the standard for browser-based rich media. The end-user, however, sees very little of the actual process of creating a Silverlight application.

The beta is useful only to developers; no Silverlight 4 player is available as of now. New to Silverlight 4 are several features to help developers create better Silverlight applications.

One is the ability to designate an app as “trusted,” enabling Silverlight to run it outside of a Web browser. Developers also can drag and drop Office documents directly into the Silverlight development interface and print from the UI.

Silverlight 4 also adds official support for the Google Chrome browser, and fully cooperates with Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint and Office. It also includes the ability to use Flash inside of Silverlight, so an app could play YouTube videos, for example.

Webcam, microphone and multicast support is also built in to Silverlight 4. On Wednesday at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform, showed how a program called SketchFlow can help developers create and demo their Silverlight apps in a bare-bones interface.